Today is The Boxing Day. As I told you last week, this is going to be a very short post, just to invite you to listen to one more song from A Ceremony of Carols.
Last week we listened to That Yongë Child, one of the carols that Britten added when he revised his work after its premiere. After that revision, the number 4 of the collection was divided in two parts: 4a, That Yongë Child, sang by a boy soprano, and 4b, Balulalow, one of original seven carols set. This part is what we are listening today; in this piece, the boy soprano begins the performing and the choir joins him at the second verse.
You might know that, from time to time, I like straying slightly off my blog’s main subject, Art Song, and travel briefly to previous ages or different genres. Today we’re making one of these short trips: we’re having a piece of work composed upon poems, we’re having an accompanist instrument, but we won't have a song cycle, instead, a choral one. Because it's Christmas and Christmas it's time for children, and also because Benjamin Britten wrote a lovely Christmas piece for children to sing.
According to Wikipedia, the term "midlife crisis" was coined in 1965 and refers to "a time where adults come to realize their own mortality and how much time is left in their life". Almost fifty years later, I don't think this round figure, 40 years, has the same connotations; if "an 35-year-old” can still benefit from young people’s discounts, it’s hardly plausible that five years later he’ll be facing an existential crisis. Or perhaps he will, who knows.
This is the 4th post of the series about "Wilhelm Meister's songs", that's to say, the songs composed upon Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. If you missed the previous posts please pull the thread here.
Wagner was a Lieder composer in his youth, he wrote, for instance, the Seven Pieces for Goethe's Faust or Der Tannenbaum. A few years later, during his first stay in Paris (1839-1842), Wagner composed a handful of songs in French, among which one excels, perhaps the best Wagner's Lieder, apart from, of course, the Wesendonck-Lieder.
